The Top Flight comments on Liverpool’s performance against Barcelona

Liverpool played an excellent game, but it was the class of the world’s greatest player that made the scoreline such a massive blowout.

When the final whistle blew, I raised my eyes to the 3-0 scoreline of Barcelona crushing Liverpool in the first leg of the Champions League semi-final and instantly thought to myself: “Liverpool don’t deserve this”. While Barcelona deserved to win and were excellent in the match, particularly in the 1st half and in the final 15 or so minutes, to say that they deserved to win by 3 goals is pushing it significantly. Liverpool played a great game and caused plenty of issues for Barcelona. Mohamed Salah was twisting and turning Jordi Alba throughout the match, and Andy Robertson was finding plenty of space on his left flank as well.

Despite this, you feel that Jurgen Klopp may have overthought this fixture a bit, and tinkered far too much with his XI – something his arch rival Pep Guardiola has been criticized for in the last year or so as well. Starting Georginio Wijnaldum at centre-forward and Joe Gomez who just came back from injury at right-back rather than Roberto Firmino and Trent Alexander-Arnold respectively was absurd from Klopp and may have cost them the match.

Liverpool should have scored at least once though, and James Milner will be kicking himself for the clear-cut opportunity that he sent right into the arms of Marc Andre Ter-Stegen when the match was at 1-1, and Mohamed Salah should be absolutely furious with himself after his open-net miss at 3-0. Had Salah scored to make it 3-1 Barcelona, Liverpool would have had a genuine chance to progress – something that you could argue they don’t have anymore.

At the end of the day however, it was the brilliance of Lionel Messi that dragged Barcelona through the 90 minutes. Liverpool had some excellent periods, but at their end nobody could produce the moments of magic, whereas at the other end, Messi has made a career off of doing exactly that.